What does a life-long meat eater do when he wants to take a popular plant-based meat for a test cook? He recruits his brother, another life-long meat eater, to help of course! My brother Randy stops by the show to compare notes on our cooking tests of three different Beyond Meat products.
We didn’t approach this test with any pre-judgement. We genuinely wanted to see how three popular Beyond Meat products measured up with some simple cooking and tasting. We tried breakfast sausages, Hot Italian sausages, and burgers. In this episode we dive deep into our methods and reactions to cooking and tasting each of these products. Did we love them? Hate them? How did they fare when compared to their meat-based counterparts? All these questions answered, and more, as we take Beyond Meat for a test cook!
Mentioned in this Episode
Beyond Meat is one of a number of popular and growing plant-based “meat” brands. They have a wide variety of products that can be found in both the frozen section or meat section of most supermarkets.
For our test, we tried three products: breakfast sausages, Hot Italian sausages, and Beyond Beef (which we formed into burger patties).
Right after we did our test cook, Beyond released a new product into restaurants, their Beyond Chicken Tenders.
Here are a few pics of my test cook results:
Brick o’ Beyond Beef. 
Kind of looks like ground beef, but not quite. 
Using a round cookie cutter to form the patties. 
The color gets better when they cook. I actually enjoyed these quite a bit. 
Hot Italian sausage. First attempt I cut up and cooked in a frying pan. 
Good crisping when fried in a pan. Definitely the preferred method for me. 
This ain’t your grandpa’s Hot Italian sausages. These were grilled whole. The “skin” is…interesting.
I was told by a farmer who visited a vegan “meat” test kitchen, that beef blood was used some way in the preparation. Is that true? Does Beyond Sausage contain any trace of animal blood?